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Citizen's input to big data: Maria Teresa's view

Maria Teresa is a 57-year-old woman who lives in a low-income neighbourhood in an average-sized town in Southern Europe. As a child, she attended primary school but had to leave early in order to work. She made her living from manual works which she had to quit to raise her kids.

Maria Teresa has never read about the WHO's social determinants of health,1 or heard about ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’ by Marmot;2 she would not be able to pronounce Virchow properly, or explain what happened in Silesia.3 She has no idea about what has been going on in the Conferences on Health Promotion over the past three decades. She does not know what the term health assets means or might think Antonovsky4 is a member of that newly arrived immigrant family down the road or an exotic dancer of that famous Russian ballet. However, Maria Teresa could draw an extraordinary picture of the sociodemographic developments of her neighbourhood over the past 40 years; of how unemployment has affected her community; on the different health conditions suffered by women and men; on the effects of drug consumption in the 1980s and how that terrible epidemic took away several dozen lives among the local youths; of how and why more and more women in her neighbourhood take anxiety medication, and about …

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